“Crias” do vermelho e branco: os fazeres cotidianos na transmissão dos vínculos comunitários e culturais no Caxambu e no Aprendizes do Salgueiro

Abstract

The research approaches two spaces that carry the name Salgueiro: the Mirim Samba School Aprendizes do Salgueiro and Caxambu do Salgueiro. In these places, I follow three actors, observing how they operate within their territories, weaving everyday practices into the transmission of community and cultural bonds. The research unfolds through a path or walk between spaces, relationships, and experiences, drawing on the methodological approaches of participant observation and correspondence practices. On the asphalt, Aprendizes do Salgueiro appears as a fundamental site in this trajectory, combining educational, cultural, and social dimensions in the daily life of a children’s samba school. Mara Rosa’s work emerges as a key component in organizing activities, especially in structuring everyday practices and cultural transmission. By accompanying Mara, the research seeks to demonstrate that the children’s continued participation in the project is marked by learning processes, teachings, and forms of organization that set in motion the transmission of community and cultural belonging. The study also situates Aprendizes within the history of children’s samba schools in Rio de Janeiro, presenting its origins, institutional transformations, and its relationship with Acadêmicos do Salgueiro, while describing the daily life observed during field visits among children, guardians, volunteers, and the board of directors. The research path is shaped by prior engagements that contributed to the construction of the fieldwork, including collective experiences in the Design and Anthropology Laboratory and in the extension project Cozinha das Tradições. On Morro do Salgueiro, Emerson Menezes and Marcelo Rocha appear alongside the Caxambu circles and community and cultural-building processes. Caxambu do Salgueiro emerges as a space of cultural continuity and community mobilization, where practices, memories, and social relations are sustained through the participation of different generations. Also on the hill, there is the preparation of a formal claim seeking recognition of the hill as a quilombola territory. The category “cria,” mobilized by one of the research interlocutors, is activated as a notion that helps to reflect on what I perceived in the field, as I sought to observe people shaped through everyday relationships, coexistence, and references produced communally and culturally. It highlights bonds that go beyond family dimensions and are constituted more broadly through shared experiences within the territory. In both spaces, the “crias” I accompany in the field act as bridges between older and younger generations, between community and cultural traditions and the formation of youth within the community. In the final chapters, the analysis expands to the territory of Morro do Salgueiro, addressing the historical, urban, social, and cultural dimensions of the Salgueiro territory. In this dissertation, walking between spaces, people, and experiences constitutes the very method of the research, observing the territory as a place of memory, transmission, and the production of territoriality and community, as well as of the subjects who live there—the “crias” of Salgueiro.